Introduction
Overview Corpus
*** PLEASE DO NOT SHOW THIS PORTFOLIO IN CLASS ***
For this portfolio I choose to compare two of my favorite composers: Joe Hisaishi and Hans Zimmer. They are both know for their scores in the film industry with their own unique styles. I’m interested in how they differ in the way they compose and how this can be explained by the geographic region, as Joe Hisaishi mostly works with Japanese films and Hans Zimmer with his career in Hollywood.
Short Introduction of the composers
As Joe Hisaishi is one of the most famous Japanese composer, known for over 100 film scores and the association with the animator Hayao Miyazaki, he has provide many composition which has worldwide success, including the opening theme of Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away and later on the score of Howl’s Moving Castle. His composingstyle can be described as gentle, minimalistic and melancholic, which also becomes a trademark of much of the studio Ghibli’s output.
Hans Zimmer is a German film score composer and producer. His work are notable for integrating electronic sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements. He has many award winning compositions include The Lion King and the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
Visualisations
Compare the overall energy using violinplot
As shown in the violinplot, both artists have a relatively low energy in terms of intensity and activity of their audio features. The graph indicates that both artists have a pretty similar energy level in terms of their work looking at the shape of the violin, this is also supported by the fact that they both have an average energy level at 0.21 (indicated by the red dot).To have a better understanding in the meaning of the feature ‘energy’, we introduce another feature ‘valence’ in the next graph.
Energy vs valence: a scatterplot comparison
In this graph valence is plotted against the energy of both artists. Each point indicates an album of artist. As we can see from the scatterplot, the density is a largest in the left-under area where both energy and valence is low. Hans Zimmer’s work mostly has a very low valence level(0-0.125) and a low to medium energy level(0-0.50), while Joe Hisaishi’s work has a more even contribution across the left-under section. From both graph we can conclude that both artist have a pretty similar composing style where the valence and the energy is low, i.e. the soundtracks sound pretty sad according to the music theory (- valence, - energy).
Analysing audio using chromagram: Hans Zimmer
As mentioned before, Hans and Joe have pretty similar composing styles according to Spotify API. I’m curious to see where the difference lies when I compare two soundtracks of them where the energy level and the valence level is the same. I’ll compare Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack ‘Toupee Or Not- Toupee’ with Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack ‘The Dorok Army Stikes Back’ (both have an energy of 0.73 and valence of 0.97).
As shown in the chromagram, this soundtrack consist of the use of various keys, pitches with the most energy are mostly in the range of F# to A. Also pitch B is commonly used. The green block (pitch B) at the end of the timeline could be explained as the soundtrack is ended with a crash cymbal.
Analysing audio using chromagram: Joe Hisaishi
Compared to the previous chromagram of Zimmer’s soundtrack, Hisaishi’s soundtrack has the most energy in pitch G over time. Differ from Zimmer, this soundtrack pay little attention to pitch B although it’s easier to see what they do have in common than what they don’t.
Discussion
About the chromagram
Chromagrams is handy in the way you can align two pieces together and tell the difference, but it’s pretty difficult in this case, as two composers don’t have a piece where they both have worked on. So the logical next step is using chromagram to annotate key moments as you can see the energy levels of various pitches. However the compared pieces are totally different and it’s hard to tell whether chromagram is a good choice here.